Kansas Planned Parenthood’s tie to harvesting baby parts

Gov. Brownback’s instruction Tuesday that abortion facility inspections by the medical board and health department include inquiries into organ harvesting was called “political grandstanding” by Laura McQuade, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Kansas Mid-Missouri (PPKMM).

However, the media neglected to showcase that Kansas really has good reason to probe abortion businesses. PPKMM’s Overland Park abortion business, Comprehensive Health, did indeed have onsite abortion specimen procurement for years— involving at least two companies during the 1990s according to testimony.

Planned Parenthood hopes no one will remember that their procurement programs were a key reason Kansas passed a law in 2000 covering “harvesting” of bodily parts of unborn children.

McQuade told the media Tuesday, “Our affiliate does not have or participate in tissue donation programs.” If that is so, what is the harm in an official inquiry?

The public has a right to know, especially after the release of two shocking videos by the pro-life Center for Medical Progress (July 14 and July 21) that show secretly-recorded discussions of fetal harvesting by top-ranked physicians of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA).

Of note also, is that PPKMM is using the tamer, more amorphous term “tissue donation.” By contrast, Planned Parenthood physicians in those videos clearly discuss what abortion techniques insure they can retrieve specific entire organs and “intact” samples.

PPKMM CEO McQuade

Though McQuade wants the public to dismiss these discoveries about PPFA, probing the unseemly side of procuring aborted-baby body parts is not new, and did not come from pro-lifers.

According to a March 8, 2000 episode of ABC News 20/20, a whistle-blower claimed two tissue-retrieval companies he worked for went so far as to, on some occasions, encourage him to take fetal tissue obtained from women who had not consented to donate their child’s remains for research.

WHAT HAPPENED IN KANSAS
More specifically, on that program, Miles Jones, owner of Opening Lines, said he was able to make $50,000 a week from the sale of fetal body parts. Jones’ company supposedly held a contract with PPKMM to dispose of the clinic’s fetal tissue, from which “donated tissue” was put up for sale at a profit during a 10-week period in 1998. (Read more here and here)

Opening Lines had a price list that advertised costs for various fetal body parts, such as: $999 for the brain of a fetal child between 22-23 weeks, $150 for skin, $325 for a spinal cord, $550 for reproductive organs, and $75 apiece for eyes, according to March 2000 accounts of ABC’s 20/20 and the Kansas City Star.

Even though an investigation eight years later by the US Attorney in Kansas concluded that Jones did not violate any federal laws, the harvesting was connected to the Kansas Planned Parenthood. Gov. Brownback thus has good reason to check up on baby body part trafficking, based not only on recent history at Planned Parenthood, but on current conditions.

OPPORTUNITY IN KANSAS?
Kansas should be alert to this fetal harvesting issue because all three in-state abortion businesses currently perform dismemberment abortions upon living unborn children who have not already been killed with a lethal injection by the abortionist. The new law banning such abortions on still-living unborn children is under injunction and being appealed.(see here)

637 such Kansas abortions were reported to the health department in 2014. We have absolutely no idea what became of those remains, but the opportunity potentially exists for aborted baby body parts trafficking in Kansas.

Dismemberment of unborn children while still alive is the abortion method that yields “useable” intact bodily organs and limbs and is clearly the method discussed in the full-length version of the July 14 video.

Pro-life researcher Theresa Dreisher, Ph.D., who spent more than 20 years in the commercial biomedical industry, commented on the current video revelations in a new National Catholic Register report (here).

“In order to get good heart tissue, it has to be processed within five minutes of death. I bet the gruesome fact is that many of those babies are alive when they are harvested.”

The “sale” of organs for transplantation, both adult and fetal, is illegal, but donation of tissue — both from aborted fetuses and from adults — is not. Payment for “reasonable” costs, including payments associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, and storage is allowed under federal law, the pertinent provisos being 42 U.S. Code 274e and 42 U.S. Code 289g.

CMP director Daleiden

In that same NCR report,the Center for Medical Progress video project director, David Daleiden, said they have at least a dozen video exposes on this topic and plan to release one a week.

He explained, “Our investigators spent almost three years deeply imbedded with Planned Parenthood and their affiliates and we heard from their own mouths, over and over, again and again, that they make money off of selling the parts of aborted babies and have a profit motive in doing so.”

“Turning aborted babies into a revenue stream is an inhuman exploitation of the not fully dead,” Daleiden continued. “They are saying that some unborn babies are more valuable dead than alive. It’s a terrible, barbaric place for a democratic society to go.”